1991 O-Pee-Chee Premier

This is the final pack of 1991 O-Pee-Chee cards that I got from Motherscratcher at the beginning of April. Now, THIS pack features some greats!


Jeff Conine (Royals), Eddie Murray (Dodgers), and Luis Sojo (Angels) come out of the pack first. Eddie Murray!? Sweet. Jeff Conine!? Cool. I have him (and Murray of course) in my non-Indians collection. I really have no rhyme or reason for a lot of the players I have in there.


Pat Tabler (Blue Jays), Barry Bonds (Pirates), and Vince Coleman (Mets) are up next. Anyone remember Bonds when he was thin and one of the most hated, er disliked, players in Pittsburgh? It's a shame, really.*


And, the last card in the pack is ..... Dale (expletive) Murphy (Phillies)! Holy friggin cow! That is awesome. I do have to say, though, he does not look right when he is shown in anything other than a Braves uniform...

*No reason for the asterisk, other than there seems to always be one whenever his name is mentioned... Wonder why that would be? (Yes, Sheldon, that's sarcasm)

1991 O-Pee-Chee Premier

This pack of 1991 O-Pee-Chee Premier features a few very recognizable names:


Will Clark (Giants), Mel Rojas (Expos), and Barry Jones (Expos) lead things off. Will Clark is the stand-out in this trio for sure.


Next up, we find Junior himself (Mariners), Pedro Guerrero (Cardinals), and Hensley Meulens (Yankees). That's actually not a bad trio, though I would venture to say most folks would put Griffey at the top of the list here.


And, since there is an odd number of cards in the pack, Todd Hundley (Mets) gets his card on a line to himself.

1991 O-Pee-Chee Premier (Pack #2)

For your enjoyment and perusal, here is another pack of 1991 O-Pee-Chee Premier that I received from Motherscratcher.


This one features Don Mattingly (Yankees), Scott Sanderson (Yankees), and Brett Butler (Dodgers). Two Yankees in a row? Wow, maybe I should start a "Yanks or no Yanks" game... By far, Mattingly is the star in this trio! Butler spent four seasons with the Tribe back in the day.


Rounding out this pack, we have... wait a minute... The pack says "7 cards" per pack. This one only has SIX cards! I got ripped off. Wait, these were a gift. Nevermind... Well, maybe they should have added "on average" to their packs....

Here we have Devon White (Blue Jays), Bernie Williams (Yankees), and Jack Morris (Twins). Man, another Yankee. Half the pack was Yankees. You won't hear me complain though, I got some nice giveaway cards out of it.

Though, I still think they ripped SOMEONE off...

1991 O-Pee-Chee Premier

I received a box of cards and wax packs from Motherscratcher the other day, and I thought the best thing to do with a gift like that is to share it with everyone else! The first pack I am opening is a 1991 O-Pee-Chee Premier. The pack itself (above) is shiny and gold - a combination sure to bring collectors running, right? There are 7 cards in each pack.


The first two cards out of the gate are Roberto Alomar (Blue Jays) and Ozzie Smith (Cardinals)! Holy crap! Now, THAT'S the way to start a pack. The cards themselves feature (in my opinion) photography that is a step above the 80's Donruss cards, but not too much higher. The top of each card features a gold banner with the company logo on the left and a multi-colored 'Premier" on the right. Photos are surrounded by a colored border. Below the photo is the player's name, team, and position. The position is written in English followed by a French translation. O-Pee-Chee is a Canadian company, after all.


I don't know much about the history of the company, but I am guessing these are called "Premier" because it's the first time the company did not use photos and designs from Topps. It sounds good anyway.

Next in the pack, is Roger Clemens (Red Sox), Tim Wallach (Expos), and Dave Winfield (Angels). Seriously? This pack is turning out to be an early 90's collector's dream (edited due to younger readers that I know frequent the site). Holy crap (again!).


The last two cards are Chris Nabholz (Expos) and Gary Scott (Cubs). I decided to show the backs of the cards this time. The backs feature a large closeup of the player on the left. The upper right features the card number (BTW, Alomar is card #1) and the scripted "Premier" again. They really wanted you to know this was THE PREMIER set. The player's name in all-caps is next with the position below that in English and French. The previous year's stats are shown in a bright yellow box along with "carriere" info (that's French for career). Beneath the photo, we find biographical information, all in English.

Really, so the only part in French is the player's position!? I don't even know what to say to that.

In the lower right corner, the team logo and the bottom of the card features logos from the various MLB property entities. I admit, after shuffling through these a couple more times, the photos aren't quite as bad as I had thought originally.

'07/08 UD O-Pee-Chee Hockey - Finally! Hockey, on APAD.

That's right peeps. Hockey. In July. Right here. Fire up the Zamboni!

First off, I'd like to thank Ben for inviting me to provide a Canadian perspective here on APAD. So be prepared for Hockey, sled dog references, and a lot of sentences ending in, eh? (oh, and I've been told I have a slightly unhealthy obsession with Chipper Jones and Adam LaRoche... but I digress)

Shall we?

14 packs per blaster, 6 cards per pack. looking for a whole craplode of inserts and parallels.

#216 Tomas Vokoun

#175 Chris Chelios - a little known fact that both Chris and Julio Franco were shipmates of Ponce de Leon in his quest.

#549 Marquee Rookie - Jack Johnson - promising prospect scored 3 goals, 8 assists, 76 penalty minutes in 74 games during his rookie season. What did you expect? he plays for the Kings.

#74 Stephane Yelle - Hey! A Flame! It's always yummy pulling a hometown Calgary boy.

#134 Rick Nash

#270 Jason Arnott Silver Parallel - doesn't scan worth a crap, but a cool card. JC's like shiny things!

Not a bad pack. A future Hall of Famer (if he ever retires), two inserts, and a Calgary Flame. (Sorry dayf, they're mine now... let it go)

1978 O-Pee-Chee Baseball

1978 O-Pee-Chee Short history – O-Pee-Chee was a candy company founded in 1911 by Canadian brothers. They first tried their hand at trading cards in 1933. From 1965 through 1994 they were a licensee for Topps baseball cards. For many of the years the Topps and O-Pee-Chee cards were very similar. The company was purchased by Nestle in 1996 and Upper Deck started using the name for some of their trading cards in 2006.

Ruppert Jones played from 1976 to 1987.

Sal bando played from 1966 to 1981 and his brother Chris played for the Indians.

Sixto Lezcano played from 1974 – 1985.

Steve Rogers played from 1973 – 1985 for Montreal, and was born in Missouri.

Willie McCovey, a HOF player, played from 1959 to 1980.

Dennis Eckersley, a HOF player, played from 1975 to 1998

Enos Cabell played from 1972 to 1986 and he and six others got in trouble because of the Pittburgh drug trials.

Ivan Dejesus played from 1974 – 1988 for 7 different teams, his son Ivan Jr. plays in the Minors.

Milt May played from 1970 to 1984 and his father, Merrill played for the Phillies.

Milt may (a double in a pack of 10 cards, yikes)

Card condition and layout – The centering is good and the corners are in great shape (for 30 year old cards). Except for the O-Pee-Chee copyright on back and some of the text being in French you could easily mistake this for a Topps card. It was nice that the card back that had contact with the adhesive was not damaged. Also you can’t beat the 15 cent sticker price. On the back of the wrapper it says if you send in 5 wrappers and 65 cents you will receive a pennant of your favorite team. The back of the card also has the “Play Ball” game that a couple of the bloggers have been talking about.

The 20 for $40 re-wrap: 1991 O-Pee-Chee Premiere

And now it's time for a long-distance dedication.

This pack of 1991 O-Pee-Chee Premiere is dedicated to a guy who rated it as the tenth best baseball card set of the early-90s -- three places ahead of the mighty 1994 Fleer.

Ben: Keep your feet on the ground, and keep reaching for the stars.



Base:
Steve Bedrosian
The 1987 NL Cy Young winner, Bedrock spent the '91 season as setting up Rick Aguilera for the World Champion Twins.

Juan Gonzalez
434 career home runs, 1936 hits, 1998 AL MVP. Juan Gonzalez: HOFer, or not?

Hensley "Bam Bam" Muelens
Your prototypical AAAA player. Was the MVP of the International League in 1990, but hit .222/6/29 in 288 ABs for the Yankees in '91. Muelens was the first player from Curacao to play in the Bigs.

Kevin Maas
Dubbed the heir-apparent to Don Mattingly, Maas reached the 10 career home run milestone faster than any player in Major League history. In 1991 he hit .220 and struck out 128 times. (in 500 ABs)

Terry Shumpert
A second round pick of the Royals in '87, Shumpert would go on to play 14 seasons with six different teams.

Will Clark
Did you know that Will Clark is a direct descendant of William Clark -- of "Lewis and Clark" fame? Well you do now!

Wade Taylor
1991 would be Taylor's first (and last) season in the Majors. He would finish his career with a record of 7-12 with an ERA of 6.27.

1978 O-Pee-Chee Baseball

Too pretty for video pack breaks? Perhaps...
I'll attempt to pick up the slack here by posting the oldest pack this blog has seen to date.

While questing for Robin Yount items elusive enough to have avoided my grasp, I stumbled across this pack with under an hour left in the bidding and a very low price tag, lower than any single 2007 or 2008 packs I've opened recently. The Yount was visible through the rear of the wrapper, and I already have it, but I decided to take the plunge, all the way back to the year in which I was born.

Let's tear in.

Top to Bottom:
29 Robin Yount

231 Mike Flanagan
220 Dave Concepcion NL All Star

204 Lou Brock (Man, does he look cool on this card or what. I can imagine a night on the town in 1978 with Lou Brock, Lou Rawls, and Lew Alcindor. Fun times.)

118 Ted Sizemore
6 1977 Strikeout Leaders - Phil Niekro/Nolan Ryan

47 Lee May
121 Luis Gomez
81 Will McEnaney
168 John Mayberry

Grade: A
I think it's pretty hard to top a ten-card pack with four Hall of Famers. And let's talk about Dave Concepcion for a while here. My sources indicate nine All Star Game appearances, one All Star Game MVP, five Gold Gloves, and four World Series appearances. How is he not in the Hall? Every article I found calls Concepcion the best shortstop of the 1970s. Nine All Star games on the decade's dominant team? It's not like he snuck in as the sole mandatory representative of a basement-dwelling team. On behalf of all Reds fans (which I am not), I demand his placement in the HoF.

That was a lot of fun to open. I'm sure I'll be topped within the space of a week, but I'm enjoying my brief tenure of the title "Blog's Oldest Pack."

Oh, and the 29-year-old gomme balloune? It will not be entering my mouth. You had me at '81 Fleer.

One more thing. For any of you weights and measures nuts, this emmer effer weighs 4 grams.
Blame Canada.

2007-2008 O-Pee-Chee Hockey Three-fer

I've managed to stumble into writing the site's 250th post, so I'll give you three packs for your enjoyment to commemorate the event. We'll hit one thousand before you know it! Today I've got some 2007-2008 O-Pee-Chee hockey to rip. There are a couple reasons I bought this stuff. First, I've never actually been able to buy a pack of O-Pee-Chee in a retail store before. This used to be Canadian only before Upper Deck bought them out and the last time I was in Canada I was 5. Secondly, the NHL All-Star Game and Fan Fest is in Atlanta this year. This includes a trading card show sponsored by Upper Deck, which of course means wrapper redemptions. Upper Deck is offering a bunch of Thrasher cards as rewards for opening wax at the show, but I can't open wax if there's nothing I want to buy. Any money I spend there is money I don't have to buy 2008 Topps and Heritage baseball, so I really, really don't want to waste a lot of cash on junk hockey wax I don't even collect just to get a couple of Thrashers promos. Pack prices tend to be a tad inflated at these things too, which doesn't help. That's where O-Pee-Chee comes in. OPC is the quintessential Hockey card (well, other than maybe Parkhurst) plus the stuff is cheap. You can get a handful of retail packs to rip for under ten bucks which is always nice. If O-Pee-Chee is worth it, I'll have something to rip while I'm there to get the goodies. Plus Todd McFarlane will be there hawking his Action Figures and signing autos, and it would be awesome if I could get my copy of Spawn #10 with the Cerebus crossover signed. Let's see how this stuff looks.

Pack 1:
91 Andrew Ladd
356 Joffrey Lupul
233 Lubomir Visnovsky
253 Chris Higgins
589 Torrey Mitchell Marquee Rookies
260 Cristobal Huet

Well the stuff certainly looks great. The gold and black borders with the subtle cross hatching looks really slick, plus any hockey set with the team logo prominently displayed is a good one. The cards are printed on old-school gray cardboard too, which is fantastic. It's a pretty large set so pretty much every player who spent significant time with their team should be in the checklist. Not bad at all so far. I'm not crazy about the backs though, the base cards are a tad minimalist for my tastes and the Rookie card is printed in full color on the back which looks terrible. You can't tell from the scan, but the colored ink causes a glare on the back that makes it really hard to read. No foil, which is refreshing. The most disturbing thing about this set is that it has a 600 card checklist with short printed rookies and Upper Deck could only manage to squeeze 6 cards per pack. Why? Is gray cardboard that freaking expensive nowadays? Plus most packs have a rookie or insert in them so that's 5 base cards per pack. So now I'm looking at three boxes minimum with perfect collation for even a shot at a base set. Ugh. It's a nice set though, so let's check out the second pack.

Pack 2:
162 Mike Ribeiro
62 Andrew Peters
322 Peter Prucha
274 Vernon Fiddler
CL24 Pittsburgh Penguins Checklist
436 Vaclav Prospal

I have to admit that out of the packs I got, the Penguins checklist is my favorite pull. I love the old cartoony penguin logo. The checklist also give a little more info about the breakdown of the set. Penguin cards are numbered 383-399, so UD grouped all the players by team, which is nice for team collectors. There are 17 Penguin cards in the checklist, so it looks like most teams will have a good number of players. They didn't list any rookie cards on the checklist, which is strange. You'd think there'd be at least one Penguin in the 100 card rookie set, and a team checklist is useless if you don't have all the cards on it. Nice stuff, but I'm still not sold. At the bare minimum though this pack break has made me want to check for a Thrashers team set online.

Pack three:
222 Dan Cloutier
362 Kimmo Timonen
132 Ryan Smyth
264 Alexander Perezhogin
SH2 Daniel Alfresson Season Highlights
35 Phil Kessel

Upper Deck got one thing right with this set, the inserts are shiny. Real shiny. Refractor-like shiny. Alfredsson's not a bad pull either, a Buffalo fan would soil themselves if they pulled this card. I'll say one thing for this set, if I collect any hockey set this year, it will be this one. Problem is, I'm still extremely bitter over the cancellation of the season a couple of years before. Dany Heatley was my absolute favorite hockey player ever, and I got to watch his Thrashers career end with assclown Gary Bettman announcing that the season had to be canceled because billionaire owners just couldn't work out with the millionaire players how they should divvy up the money pie. A money pie that looks more like an overcooked Hostess fried pie now thanks to their short sightedness. Oh well. Even though I'm still angry at the NHL, this will be my only chance to go to a Hockey Fanfest show and I'll probably end up checking it out anyway. The chance to stalk Todd McFarlane so I can ask if he'll show me his balls is too big a temptation to pass up. I'm still not sure if I'll be ripping any wax there though since Upper Deck decided to be stingy with the cards per pack. Maybe I can sneak a couple of Thrashers promos without anyone seeing. Everybody is going to want Sidney Crosby anyway.

DONT CHEW THE GUM

Fellow blogger Scott saw the awesome contents of my '87 Topps Football pack and was so inspired that he stated he might chew the gum in his own pack. I thought it was a joke until he stated it again in his '89 Bowman pack review. I just want to state for the record, DON'T DO IT. Those things aren't Twinkies, those chalky sticks of gum were never meant to be consumed after a certain period of time has elapsed. The time it takes for the factory to seal the wrapper and place the packs in the box is about the shelf life on that stuff. If you don't believe me, here's visual proof:

Does that look chewable to you? Go ahead and click on it to get the full visual impact. After a certain period of time the molecular structure begins to change and it transforms into something not of this world. Kind of like Melvin Junko in The Toxic Avenger after he takes a dive into the vats of Toxic Waste. (warning: link is skeery and gory in case your work don't like that stuff) Yeah Melvin is a hero, but do you really want to chew on him? If that doesn't convince you take a gander at what it did to the card:

That's not gum damage, that's a whole new lifeform devouring that card like the kids on the raft in Creepshow 2. You want that in your mouth? Even the new gum in Heritage packs goes south rather quick, look at this stuff from a box of Heritage I opened a couple years ago:

That gum is hermetically sealed in plastic, and it's still turning all sorts of funky colors. If you're still not convinced that such an innocent little pink stick of gum could be so evil, here's one more bit of evidence: a 1988 pack of O-Pee-Chee.

120 Kirby Puckett
149 Ken Howell
175 Kevin Bass
181 Mariano Duncan
189 Bob Dernier
87 Casey Candaele rookie cup
82 Dion James

That thing is stuck tight to Kirby like the critter on John Hurt's face in Alien. It's even turned the color of The Blob. No, not the good version with Steve McQueen, the cheezy 80's remake version. Look at that mess! THE GUM HAS BONDED MOLECULARLY TO KIRBY. Nope, it couldn't decide to eat Casey Candaele, it had to go after the only good card in the pack. Let's do our best to try to save Kirby.

Well, it looks like Kirby will live and he didn't even lose a limb, but he will have the scars from this terrifying encounter forever. He got off easy, one of the other cards in this group of O-Pee-Chee packs I bought a while back was completely devoured by the monster gum. I'd post a scan, but it turned sentient and escaped. Heed my warning, and DON'T CHEW THE GUM!